Blind Guide
by Kinetikat
Summary: Story set immediately after the events of season 3's "Common Ground". Todd the Wraith is marooned on a barren rock by the Hive he hoped would rescue him. Can he finally escape the ghosts of his past? Todd whump? Oh yeah! Reviews please!
1. Chapter 1

**Just to state the obvious, I do not own copyright in any of the characters belonging to 'Stargate: Atlantis' and MGM; as direct source of inspiration for Todd/Guide's story, step up Jo Graham, Melissa Scott and Amy Griswold, the authors of the 'Stargate Atlantis: Legacy' books, who have articulated the world of the Wraith so elegantly and with such (if this is the right word) humanity. They really should shoulder part of the blame for this!**

**The hermit crab is my own Original Character.**

**BLIND GUIDE**

The hermit crab thought he had gone away. He could see the tips of its whip-like antennae moving beneath the little rock shelf down there, testing the water, watchful, cautious. But not cautious enough, not today. He had crawled round so that no shadow fell on the sandy bottom of the pool, and now he waited, schooling his breathing so that nothing disturbed the surface of the water.

A tiny fish flicked across his field of vision, a flash of iridescent blue-green that made him blink. For a second his focus jumped, confused by the dazzle of sunlight on the surface, and his own eyes glared up at him, startlingly yellow in a white mask, pupils narrowed to threads in the harsh light. He blinked again, and squinted past the reflection of face and hand to find that the crab had vanished.

No, wait; he held his breath, gritting his teeth against the burning ache in his hand. There: in the same place as before, the rust-red, hair-thin strands of questing antennae, longer now, further out, thinking it was safe. A few grains of sand shifted, just where the sun cast the little rock shelf into shadow. _Just... hold... still._ His eyes stung from squinting into the salty wind, and there was a tremor in his fingers that had nothing to do with muscle strain.

It was another fifty seconds before the tiny crab edged noncholantly out of its hiding-place, fifty seconds counted in unbearable stillness, the sun a searing weight on his bare back, his own hair tickling between his shoulder-blades where the breeze off the ocean had tugged it free of its binding.

The crab had adopted a broken shell as its home, and the lopsided thing dragged a tiny wobbly furrow in the sand as its occupant trundled along, black bobble eyes swivelling, unaware of its danger as he had been unaware, standing where Sheppard had left him that night beside the stargate, thinking that the warm net of the culling-beam meant rescue, safety, _belonging_, after so long alone in the dark.

He would not make such a mistake again; it had been a measure of his extremity that he had made it this time, and he hesitated, the claws of his feeding hand flexed, trembling, just above the surface of the water. Below, the crab paused, as if finally realising that something was wrong. Too late.

He thrust his hand into the water, grabbed the tiny wriggling thing and struggled to his knees, snarling involuntarily at the foreign sting of salt in his handmouth. The crab waved its oversized pincer in the air indignantly, and clamped it on to the tip of his thumb claw. He pulled it free with an effort, fingers clumsy with need, and crammed the creature against the swollen feeding membranes in his palm, shuddering at the hot lick of sensation. For a second, he felt the lips tighten around the struggling limbs, felt the familiar blossoming warmth spread out from his hand; only for a second.

He tried to eat the creature anyway, tearing off spindly limbs with his teeth, crunch and crack, bitter juices staining his beard and fingers. Futile. It wouldn't nourish him, couldn't give him what he truly needed. Guide, one-time Consort to a mighty Queen, Hivemaster and ship commander, spat the half-chewed mess into the sand and for the hundredth time, cursed the impulse that had driven him to take the first decent meal he'd had in years and bestow it all on John Sheppard. As if the human's life was worth the same as his own.

"Foolishness", he said out loud, and was startled by the dry rasp of his own voice. Foolishness or not, the giving of the gift had left him debilitated, almost as weak as he had been in the Genii cell. He felt he should be thirsty, but he could not concentrate on the thought long enough to bring it into focus. He dragged himself to his feet, shivering. He was too warm in the heavy leather trousers and boots, but the loose dry sand of the beach was hot enough to blister unprotected skin even in the late afternoon. He turned his face away from the sun, and gazed for a long moment at the pale phantom hanging in the sky like a watery reflection of the sun itself. Then he laughed, a humourless bark of sound, and quoted aloud, softly, "The harvest moon is rising, Wraith are never-ending..."

Which might or might not turn out to be true in his case. Guide hissed and shook his head, mocking at the moment, and trudged back up the shallow slope of the beach to where he had left his coat.


	2. Chapter 2

When the heavy dazzle of the culling-beam dispersed and left him standing alone in the narrow holding-pen, she had already been there, waiting, a careful pace outside the chitin-web door. He had put out a hand to steady himself against the wall and stood there for a long moment, transfixed by the half-forgotten sensation of the ship's life pulsing against his skin, the wordless touch of it in his mind, sensate and strong; _home_. He closed his eyes at the deep ache that word summoned.

*Has it been so long?* Her quiet voice slipped into his head along with the ship, and he jerked to face her, unable to suppress the snarl that bubbled in his throat, aware at the same time that the neatly-dressed figure who stood like a bright lacquered doll between the drones who escorted her was a Queen. _Don't bare your teeth unless you can bite, boy!_ The acid tones of Snow's old Hivemaster came back to him in a snap, and he swallowed the sound, but could not keep from staring.

Scarlet hair twined in some braided arrangement that was simultaneously severe and sumptuous; pale skin, white and smooth as bone, silver-grey eyes and the barbed black tail of a clan tattoo that licked downwards from the hollow of her throat. Her lips were scarlet too, and curled in a small, cool smile as she allowed his scrutiny.

"Well?" She spoke the word aloud, deliberately withdrawing from his mind, and he stammered like a hatchling, caught off guard.

"I – you're... you're a Keeper. Frost," he named her, against all protocol, snatching clumsily at the taste-touch of what her mind had shared.

"No," said the Queen, and *Not any more,* her mind echoed. Guide flinched from the cold slap of power in her voice, noticed for the first time that she wore the leathers of a ship commander, not the decorative garb of a Queen.

*And yet I am a Queen.* There was only the openwork of the web between them now, though he did not recall moving his feet. She lifted his gaze effortlessly to meet hers, and his breath hissed between his teeth with the strain of pushing her mind away. She permitted it, with a kind of amused tolerance, but an icy thread of fear grew in him at the power he sensed there. He formed the words with painstaking slowness.

"Who. Are. You?"

The queen's smile was sharp with irony. "I was indeed Frost, Keeper of the clans for many centuries. Our people slept safe as I stood guard over them." She made a small gesture and the web door retracted, leaving them face to face. She was impossibly slender in the tailored leathers, and the height difference meant that she had to tilt her face up to maintain eye contact. Her pupils dilated, and Guide found he was trembling, adrenalin flooding his limbs. Her grey eyes were deep pools of memory, of sorrow, her throaty voice harsh. "Then the Lanteans came and slew my sister, and the hives woke. And now..." She reached out one finely-armoured claw of her feeding hand to touch his face, and her mind's voice sounded through him like the crash of the sea. *Now I am Sanctuary.*


	3. Chapter 3

Guide twitched and shivered, pushing the confused memory away, and huddled deeper into his coat, chilled. The sun must have gone behind a cloud. He had only closed his eyes for a second, propped against the warm rock at the base of the cliff – just for a second, to rest them from the tormenting glare of white sand, white rock, white sky. Now he opened them gritty from sleep to find himself in darkness. The hissing roar of Sanctuary's mind ebbed and swelled still, and it was a long dazed moment before he realised that the sound was not in his head.

The sea. They had left him beside the sea.

A rolling hiss, and cold water slopped over his outstretched legs. He scrambled to his feet, gasping at the shock of cold, and scrubbed at his eyes with his off hand, blinking vainly to try to clear his vision.

The moon was a thumbprint smudge of white, much higher in the sky than when he had seen it earlier. The sea loomed, dark on blacker dark, whispering and hissing, only the faint streaks and fret of phosphorescence giving him a ghostly, ominous sense of its presence. Another rasp and rush of white foam over pebbles and sand, and this time the water swelled and licked almost to his knees, dragging him off-balance. Guide growled a curse. He must have slept for hours, stupefied by the heat like a lizard on a rock, and now the tide had turned. If he wasn't quick, he would be cut off from the ruins where he had sheltered for the past two nights, and he still had to wade through the stream that cut across the beach from the waterfall. If only he could get there before the incoming tide made it too deep...

He waited for a moment while the wave receded, then splashed across the jumble of rocks to the south as quickly as he could in the dark, clambering and slipping, heart pounding, heedless of scraped hands and bruised knees. Twice the water twined around him, lifted his body like flotsam despite his clutching claws, and he scrambled higher, the breath rasping in his throat, the same thin thrill of fear stabbing through him as he had felt when he struggled to fend off the mind of the Queen: the same dawning awareness of enormous power, capriciously witheld but poised to crush him on a whim.

Guide snarled, his claws scritching as he sought desperately for a handhold on the wet rock. He was almost to the edge of the rocky outcropping now, could see the pale sweep of the huge bay flung away to the south like a sleeper's arm, and he hastened his steps, taking risks jumping from rock to rock, all his attention fixed on reaching the safety of the sand. He recognised the odd, sweetish scent of the water from the falls that must by now be mixing with the incoming waves, and wondered for a second, uneasily, what the smell was. He had been so intent on his need to feed when he waded across the rusty-looking swathe earlier, he had ignored it, though he had noticed the faint chemical stink of it on the skirts of his coat when he stripped it off to pursue that ridiculous crustacean.

He was never sure, afterwards, whether he was distracted into carelessness by the memory of that hallucinatory hour hanging over the rockpool, or whether weakness made him clumsy, but as he jumped for the last outcrop, his heel slipped on the weed-slick rock and he fell awkwardly against the side of gully. There was a blank, sick second of impact and he knew he had struck his head. For a dizzy, empty space he drifted, unable to grasp any sense of up or down, or where he might be in relation to it.

Pain rushed back with awareness. He was sprawled face-down in wet sand, and the back of his head hurt with a spiky insistence that he knew meant something serious. Dark down here. Wet sand under his hands, in his mouth. He lifted his head slightly and coughed, spat a dribble of gritty saliva that tasted of blood. Wet sand. But the sand had been dry... He blinked and levered himself up on one elbow, fumbling after the significance of the thought. _Get up._ But his right leg was twisted beneath him and when he tried to move it, he screamed and fell back on to the sand, panting and snarling, heartbeat hammering in his ears. Chills chased one another across his skin, and there was a strange faraway rushing sound in his skull, like static from a badly-tuned radio signal.

He dug clawed fingers into the soft sand and dragged himself forwards a few inches, unable to muffle the ragged noises the pain forced from him, rested a second and then did it again before he lost his courage. And again, face contorted into a mask, teeth clenched. Because his world was filling up with the hiss and roar of static, louder every second, and this time he knew it was the water seething up the narrow gully to claim him.

In the last moment, when he was tumbled over and over in the swell, blinded, salt water in his mouth and nose, salt water blocking his ears and stinging in sense pits and handmouth, Guide felt oddly peaceful. He was going to die, drowned or broken against the cliff face, he couldn't feel that it mattered which. All that mattered was that she had failed, and he had kept his long-ago promise to Snow: _You are my one true queen, now and forever._ His mind filled with the sound of her low laughter, the tickle of her warm breath beside his ear as she whispered, _"And how will you keep such a promise, my brave Guide, when another Queen bids you come to her? How will you hide then?"_

The memory swallowed him whole, and he lay beside her in the warm nest of her sleeping nook, limbs entangled, the silky fall of her scarlet hair brushing his chest, her long amber eyes half teasing him with the question.

*I will lie.*

*You cannot lie to a queen.* Indulgent assurance in the touch of her thoughts. She rolled a strand of his pale hair between her long fingers, using the tip like a pen to trace the line of the star tattoo that surrounded his left eye, and he twitched and shivered, caught in her gaze unable to look away. *You see? We are too strong for you men, my sisters and I.* But she had demonstrated both love and strength that night in ardour fiercer than he had ever sensed from her before, taking and giving until they were both spent in exhaustion. He had never reiterated the promise, and Snow never spoke of it again.

_*You cannot lie to a queen.*_ And yet he had done it, not once but many, many times in the aching years of vengeance after she fell. He had been faithful to her, and he took the blood-bright memory of her scarlet hair down with him into the dark.


	4. Chapter 4

The damn silly Snoops almost missed it, zipping about among the crashing waves like a cloud of demented fireflies. Ash could swear they liked playing in the surf sometimes; other times, he suspected they were simply responding to some kind of unvoiced urging of his own.

"Back on track, boys," he murmured, and closed his eyes, concentrating on the visuals.

_A wild blur of white spray black shiny rock heaving black water – _Ash swallowed a surge of nausea. "Slow down! And let's have a little more light. We've got to find it quickly." The Snoops would execute his commands without him speaking out loud, of course, but Ash had long ago stopped worrying about talking to himself or to the objects around him. Speech was a necessary comfort in a place that nobody visited.

Almost nobody, Ash corrected himself grimly, and applied himself to chivvying the glowing Snoops into a smooth curve formation that he could send in a controlled sweep across the semi-submerged rock shelf. Even with the Snoops' illumination pushed to the maximum, it was an eye-confusing nightmare. How was he supposed to find anything in this? Irritation flared. What was the stupid creature doing on the shelf anyway? Why hadn't it just stayed where it was put, safe? Wasn't that what it was supposed to do?

"Last confirmed location," he said, and pulled back to glance at the tilted amber screen overhead as the Snoops bunched together, fidgeting. He flicked through several time-marked image captures: the black-clad figure walking away from the bleached ruins of the city; wading across the Torrent where it carved into the beach before the rocks; stripped to the waist spreadeagled on the shelf, gazing intently into a rock pool; the last two, late in the afternoon and then near dark, showed the creature hunched against the base of the cliff nearby, asleep. When he sent the Snoops spiralling across the shelf to the spot, it was already underwater, waves smacking high against the rock wall. Ash sent a single Snoop looping down into the water, just to check that it hadn't got snagged on a rock down there, but there was nothing, and he sent the tiny thing racing back to join the rest with a splash and a puff of superheated steam.

"Where did you go...?" Again he withdrew from the Snoops and frowned at the screen. _Think, think..._ it must have woken in the dark to find the tide coming in. It doesn't behave like someone familiar with the sea, so what would it do? There's nowhere to go from there, the currents and the deep-water channel cut by the Torrent mean the water comes in too quickly to cut back across, but it wasn't to know that, was it? It waded across at low water, maybe it thought it could do the same on the way back...

"Oh, no no no- _Please_ don't have done that..." He launched himself back into the Snoops with the clumsiness of horror, hurled the whole glowing mass of them south over the last of the rock shelf, wincing at the brute force of the waves as they crashed seething over the broken rock teeth at the base of the cliff. Nothing was going to be alive if it had got caught in that. He brought the Snoops to a wavering halt over the last spine of rock sticking up before the raging waves were lost in the oily surge of the Torrent. They darted jerkily back and forth, semaphoring his anxiety, and he set them sternly to searching above and below water under that last jagged outcrop, because he very much did not want to have to consider what would have happened if the creature had gone into the Torrent unprotected. He squeezed the fear down and focused grimly on the visual feeds. Worse than before on the surface, _white spray black shiny rock heaving black water._ He twitched away and sought out the Snoops searching below the surface. Visibility crap to zero down here, he'd hoped it would be better but the silt stirred up by the wave action hung in the water like fog. The Snoops' stabbing beams of light from above and below illuminated nothing but a crazy slopping lattice of empty water. He began to gather them back together, shock settling a hollow feeling in his belly. It must have gone into the Torrent, and if it had there was no way he'd find what remained, which was probably just as well.

The last few Snoops eluded him for a second, darting excitedly around something dark they had found snagged under a protruding ledge. The idiotic things were getting in each others' way, the combined visual feed a mess of bubbly black water and beams of dazzling gold light, and he took a long exasperated second to recognise that what he was seeing through five hyperactive Snoops was the black leather of the creature's coat. He stared at it dumbly, almost not believing he'd found it.

"Back up!" He yanked the excitable drones back a couple of feet, and brought the rest zipping down to spread a steadier light.

It looked dead. That was all he could think, over and over. The long skirts of its coat had tangled in the broken teeth of the ledge, and the pounding wave action had swung its body into the scooped-out trench beneath. White hair drifted across the pale face like a shroud.

_It's __**going**__ to be dead if I don't do something. _Ash hesitated. The Snoops and Fetchers would be no use for this, they lacked the finesse that would be needed to prevent the body getting thrown against the rocks as they extracted it. Even as he dithered, a fierce backwash of current dragged the thing halfway out into the gully before the swell slammed it back in again.

"This is going to make me so sick." He could taste bile at the back of his throat just thinking about it, but he clambered shakily down from the chair and stretched out on the floor in roughly the required position. He wouldn't have more than an instant, not at this distance. He reached out one last time with the Snoops to make sure he had the location right, and held his breath.

_There._ The shock of cold water all round him almost made him gasp. He hadn't been prepared for how dark it would be without the Snoops. He grabbed wildly in front of him and banged his knuckles on rock. Flailed again and tangled his arm in flapping wet leather. A gout of air escaped him in a blinding burst of bubbles, and he dragged his body closer to the creature's, clawing desperately to pull it against him.

_Back._ Air. Air, and the soft directionless light of the eyrie. Ash rolled off the creature's inert body and flopped on to the floor, retching and trembling. _That never gets any better. God, I hate sea-water._

He sat up as soon as the spasms subsided, and got his first good look at what he had rescued. Large, at least two metres tall at a guess. Humanoid, rangily built. It still looked dead, skin somewhere between white and blue-green, marbled with the grey ghosts of blood vessels, tangled white hair plastered flat. Some kind of black tattoo marking on its face. The mouth hung slightly open on sharp teeth that put him uneasily in mind of some marine predator, a translucent saw edge. It didn't seem to be breathing.

He called for Fetchers, and watched while they manipulated the creature so it lay face down. Its right leg looked wrong - broken, he guessed - and as the Fetchers turned its head to the side, he saw blood matted into the hair at the back of the skull.

First things first. The Fetchers swivelled expectantly in his direction, and he crawled over to plant his knee in the small of the creature's back. His knee encountered bone, and he put out a tentative hand; was it wearing some kind of exoskeletal armour?

"Remove its clothing." The Fetchers swarmed over the creature, snipping, unpicking, folding, so fast that it looked like an optical illusion. A small troop of them pattered off carrying the pieces, the last two in line carefully balancing a boot each, and Ash was free to run one finger doubtfully up a shallow dorsal crest, the rounded nub of each spinal process articulated with the next. _Well, this is new._

He stuck his knee in the thing's back, avoiding the crest, and shoved down hard. Water gushed from the creature's mouth and nostrils. He switched sides and repeated the action, putting all his weight into it. More water, but it still wasn't breathing. He struggled to push it over on to its back, hindering the Fetchers, who would probably have done the job quicker without him, and pressed his fingers into the cold flesh of its neck. _Stupid, really; I don't even know if its kind has a pulse there._His own heart jumped when he felt the tiny movement under his fingertips.

Well, she'd said it was tough.

He really didn't want to get any closer to those sharp predator's teeth, but he placed the thought aside, tilting the creature's head back to clear the airway and pulling the lower jaw down with a cautious finger to check the mouth was clear. The slanted furrows below each cheekbone gave him pause, but he elected to go for the obvious, pinched the creature's nostrils shut and covered its lax mouth with his own, breathing out until he saw the chest lift. He sat back on his heels, counting _one, two, three, four, five,_ as the chest gradually fell. Another breath, and he checked the pulse again; it seemed stronger, if he wasn't imagining it. _Four, five._ Another breath, and he thought he saw an extra lift of the chest. _Come. On. Three, four, five._ He was half expecting it, but it still made him jump when the thing jerked a sudden choking breath as he was leaning down, and he all but fell scrambling away from it as it convulsed, heart banging in his ears. _Shit_. The room seemed suddenly very small.

The creature jacknifed helplessly sideways in a series of wrenching spasms that made Ash's own stomach clench in sympathy. _God, but it must have swallowed a lot of water._ Eventually, the puking dwindled to dry retching, and then it just lay there panting and shuddering.

Ash started to stand, but at the first scuff of his bare foot on the floor, the creature's head twitched towards him so fast he froze, his spine making a creditable attempt to dig its way out through the rock wall behind him. _Predator. _Glaring yellow eyes fixed on him, vertical pupils blossoming into black pits, and the lips peeled back to expose the needle teeth in a breathy snarl that abruptly became a fresh bout of retching. Ash took the opportunity to call Fetchers, and was scrubbing at his own wet hair with a dry towel when the creature spoke. Its voice was rough and very faint.

"Who are you?" Ash supposed it was an improvement on the snarling, but the subtly disturbing harmonics of the alien vocal cords set his teeth on edge nonetheless. He took a quiet step backwards and saw the amber eyes flick towards the movement.

"What, not 'where am I?'"

The creature gave a coughing hiss that he took for laughter. "I very much doubt... you would tell me that even were I... to ask."

"You're right." Ash moved again, casually, and again the yellow eyes scanned for the movement. "You're safe."

It laughed again, a humourless rasp. "Now that... _that_ I do doubt."

"I won't harm you." Ash went to his knees beside the creature as it struggled to sit, pushing it back down. "Please, you're injured, you mustn't try to move-"

The thing grabbed his arm with shocking strength, yanking him off-balance. For a heart-stopping second he was face to face with it, feeling its heartbeat pound against his own, then it slammed its open right hand into his chest so hard it knocked all the breath out of him. In vignettes of discrete horror, he felt razor-sharp barbs hook into his flesh, pulling the creature's burning palm flush against his skin, and a hissed breath at his ear. _"My apologies. But I must feed."_


	5. Chapter 5

_Feed. _It was that word that loosed Ash from the shocked stupor. He yelled in terror and ported out of the room so wildly he hit off the corridor ceiling and fell in a flailing heap, scrabbling to put his back against the wall. _What the hell was that?_

He clapped a hand to his chest and brought it away wet with blood; a convulsive glance downwards showed him a deep, raw wound just below his collarbone with an odd symmetrical pattern of tiny scratches on either side. _Feed_. It had injected him with something, he could feel it, a dizzy head-rush that set his heart thumping. _Or maybe it's thumping because something just tried to eat me._

He brushed away a Fetcher that was trying to investigate the wound, and sent it off to fetch others. This was going to need some careful thought.

* * *

><p>The creature was aware of him immediately when he reappeared; the slight twitch of its head warned him. He stayed out of arm's reach this time, uncomfortably conscious of the thing's right hand slowly clenching and unclenching by its side. His own voice was barely more than a whisper.<p>

"What did you inject into me?"

For a long moment it seemed as if the creature was not going to respond, then it let out a short sigh. "An enzyme, it won't cause any... lasting damage."

"What do you mean, _no lasting damage_, you were trying to eat me!"

"I was trying to feed on you."

"What's the difference?"

The dry hiss of laughter again. "Come over here ...I'll show you." It turned its yellow eyes towards him, angling its head slightly from side to side in a curiously insectile gesture. _Triangulating my position._

"You were badly injured," Ash said. "You must try not to move."

"I must feed. If I feed, I will heal," the creature stated flatly, blinking. Ash sent a Snoop hovering in for a closer look, and saw that while one of the creature's pupils still gaped wide, the other was a thread-thin line bisecting the yellow iris. Suspicion solidified into certainty: occipital trauma. He hunkered down, more confident now.

"You can't see, can you?"

The creature snarled at that and flung its right hand desperately out towards the sound of his voice, trying to drag itself closer. Ash saw the contorted face blanch bone-white as the sudden movement twisted its broken leg; the thing uttered an odd mewling cry, and fainted.

It was probably just as well. Ash hauled the unresponsive body into a sitting position with the help of a posse of Fetchers, and positioned himself behind it with his arms wrapped round its torso so that the unconscious creature was propped against him with its head lolled back on his shoulder, water still dribbling from the rats'-tails of white hair that flopped across his face. Ash had sent a Snoop ahead to warm up the Tank; he seriously doubted that he could port this thing successfully if it was trying to kill him at the time. With a head injury, he wasn't keen to try sedating it, so this little window of opportunity was it. He'd port them both directly into the Tank, supervise the Snoops and Fetchers while they secured it and prepped it for surgery, then port out and leave them to it.

He spat another strand of wet hair off his lips, and sighed. _I am really not getting paid enough for this._


	6. Chapter 6

When the fog finally ebbed away, he was alone in a warm place, the medicinal tang of some mineral in his nostrils and sense pits. It was still dark, but the flicker of unease at that slid away before he could bring it into focus. An artificial tranquility that he recognised. Sedative. He drifted, becalmed somewhere between dreams and memories, and let words lead him back: _I'll show you._ Part ironic humour, part threat; naked need underneath. It had been many years since he had last uttered those words, and the smell of rotting fruit was what came back most strongly.

It was almost four months after he was captured. They had been keeping him on the surface then, in a windowless brick outbuilding not far from the Ring that must once have been used to house livestock, to judge by the stink of dung in the straw underfoot. The heavy half-door was kept bolted shut, but he was free to move around his makeshift cell. The two halves of the door did not fit together properly, and the narrow gap admitted a slender blade of light by day, a cutting draught by night. He spent a lot of time standing just inside the door, listening, breathing in the scents carried to him on that tiny thread of freedom. He always moved backwards when he heard footsteps approaching, so that whenever the guards unbolted and threw back the heavy top door, projectile weapons at the ready, he was standing in the centre of the floor staring at them. Guide found their palpable apprehension at his apparent immobility mildly diverting.

In the beginning they had thrown food to him as if he was some sort of domesticated animal, but that stopped very quickly after the night an officer came down to check on his men and found them gathered in a breathless, sniggering knot around the open half-door while the boldest of their number, a sweaty slob with a filthy apron tied on over his uniform, pelted him with kitchen refuse. The man crowed as a brown, mould-eaten apple found its mark with a smack. Guide turned his head and spat, resisting the urge to wipe the stuff off his face.

"Aww, look boys, he doesn't like fruit either!"

A ripple of laughter from the craning onlookers. Another self-appointed wag called out from the back of the crowd, "Come on, Branik! Everyone knows Wraith eat humans, you can't give him fruit and veg, he needs meat!"

"You mean he's a carnivore, Mallo, get it right! And since when are you an expert on the Wraith? The bastards don't _eat_ you, they suck the life out of you with that thing on their hand." The man Branik peered in at Guide over the half-door, twisting his fleshy face into a mock-confiding leer. "That's right, isn't it? Got a little surprise tucked away in your handshake?"

"Come inside." He saw them all jump at the tonal rasp of his voice, and bared his teeth, lifting his feeding hand in a beckoning gesture the obscenity of which was wasted on them. "Come inside and I'll show you."

Stark silence for a long moment; this had not been part of their game. Predictably, Branik was first to recover. "Ooh, fancy that, do you? Fancy giving Mallo here the old glad hand? He ain't got much life in him to start with, of course..."

Jeering laughter, and jostling as the unfortunate Mallo was shoved to the front by willing hands. Their fear and hate smelt sharp as blood on the night air, and so focused were they on their sport that they failed to see the approach of two other men, the first tall, solid, with the unflappable air of the non-commissioned officer, the other slighter, still fumbling to fasten the last shiny buttons of his uniform jacket as the other shoved through the knot of men ahead of soldiers fell silent. Branik tried to sidle away into the mass of men, and the tall officer checked him with a cold glance.

"Where do you think you're off to, Ranker Branik? Did I give you permission to move?"

"No sir, I was just-"

"I don't recall asking you to speak either!" The tall one bellowed directly into the man's face. Branik snapped to rigid attention, followed with varying degrees of alacrity by his fellows, and the grizzled one paced among them glaring.

"Get them in line." The second man never raised his voice, but his authority was unmistakeable. His face when he glanced in over the door was very young, a fact not hidden by the neatly-barbered attempt at a moustache and beard, but his pale gaze took in the refuse scattered on the floor and the revolting stuff plastered on the prisoner's face and in his hair. Guide met his eyes without comment. The man's mouth twisted. "Officer Sobol, two riflemen over here now. Bring a bucket of water. And Branik."

He turned on his heel as the men moved to do his bidding, and spoke in a clear, clipped voice. "Some of you men seem to think that because we are not technically serving in the Regulars here, discipline can go by the board. You are mistaken. Some of you..." and his gaze swept over them, lingering on Branik. "Some of you seem not to _think_ at all."

Faint sniggers whispered through the ranks, but the officer lifted a gloved hand and the murmur of voices stilled instantly. "Enough! We are Genii. Our forefathers were a mighty force, but even they fell before the Wraith. This-" His forefinger jabbed towards Guide. "This is no joke. This is no beast for you to make sport of. This is an enemy soldier, and the Commander will wish to interrogate him personally when he gets here. I have no intention of disappointing him or having to explain some stupid mishap. So we will not be seeing a repetition of this evening's little entertainment. I hope I make myself clear." He nodded to Sobol, drawing his pistol. "Open the door. A rifleman to each side, if you please, Officer Sobol. Ranker Branik, bring the water."

Whatever else he had expected as a conclusion to the incident, this was not it. Guide held himself very still as the Genii officer walked into the cell. The young man halted, and raised his pistol. His hand was admirably steady, despite the clear tang of fear on his skin.

"Move back three steps. Please."

If he had fed recently, he could have taken the boy in that moment – he was bigger, wilier, and much, much faster, and the fool had blocked his own covering fire by coming in head-on like that. As it was, it was all he could do to move the required three steps backwards without revealing that his legs were on the point of buckling under him. He amused himself instead by watching as the bully Branik scuffled around in the filthy straw, retrieving every noisome scrap that he had thrown, rivulets of sweat snaking down the sides of his fat face, and taking twice as long as he needed to because his hands were shaking so much. Guide huffed the greasy stink of terror out of his nostrils, suddenly hotly aware of the man's proximity, and saw the young officer's gaze flinch down to his side. Carefully, Guide closed the trembling fingers of his feeding hand, claws biting into his own palm, and inclined his head slightly to the boy.

"Ranker, out." The officer backed out after his man with great care, and Guide guessed the boy knew how close he had come to the edge of his own control. "Use the water as you wish, I will see it is replenished." Over the half-door, the grey eyes met his with open curiosity. "Do you require water... for drinking, I mean?"

Guide only hesitated for a moment. "Only when I have not fed. So... yes."

"I will see the order is given." The young officer nodded to him, and signalled to his men. "Close it up. The Commander will be here in a few days, I would very much like for us to still have a prisoner to show him when he arrives. That will be all."


	7. Chapter 7

"It's all wrong." Ash stared morosely at the vitals display on the screen above his head, and worried at the base of his thumb claw with his teeth. How could it _all_ be wrong? He tapped for a refresh of the readouts, knowing it was going to look exactly the same as the last five times he'd done it but unable to resist the impulse anyway.

He cancelled the screen before it told him what he already knew, and curled lower in the big chair, kneading absently at his knotted shoulder muscles and sighing deeply. This job had been different all the way along; it was no use expecting a sudden outbreak of normality now. So the ..._thing_ in the Tank was exhibiting the sort of vitals that would have meant it was in deep traumatic shock and nine-tenths dead, had it been human. Ash felt tenderly around the matted wound below his collarbone, and shivered. Definitely not human.

Well, whatever it was, straight Hybrid or a Type Two Manipulation like him, he needed to know more about it if he was going to treat it successfully. He went back to nibbling on the rough spot at the base of his thumb claw, and called up the recording of the radio signal that had started all this, five days ago.

"Am I speaking to the Keeper of the ...facility?" He remembered now, her voice had the same weird harmonic that had so unsettled him when the male spoke.

"This is Ash." His own voice, sounding thin by comparison and rather sibilant. "How can I help?"

"I have one who may require your services, depending on the outcome of certain tests."

"Is he sick?" Ash could hear his own dislike of this woman's roundabout phraseology. She ignored his tone.

"He is physically strong, but his mental state is ...questionable."

"And you want me to fix him for you." Ash heard himself sigh. "That isn't how the Mirror works."

"You misunderstand." The woman's tone sharpened. "If I am unable to discover and correct what ails him before I have to leave this system, I will be forced to quarantine him. There is no question of him remaining on board unless he is whole, it would be far too dangerous. All I require from you is to contain him until my return. I understand that your ...abilities permit this."

There was a long pause before Ash's own voice said, reluctantly, "What do you have to trade?"

In hindsight, perhaps he should have asked a few more questions before agreeing to the trade. Like, _questionable how?_ And _what do you mean, whole? _And _dangerous in what way, exactly?_

Ash sighed again. The tip of his tail was twitching back and forth, and he stilled it, irritated by the extraneous motion. Even after the payment had been agreed, it had been a further two days before the Snoops woke him at some unholy hour of the morning with the news that an aircraft had risen from the sea off the Watchers.

He could hear it by the time he got to the Caves, a thin dragging scream of sound that set his teeth on edge. He peered out through the observation slit, wincing from the twinkling brightness of sun on sea. It took a moment before he spotted the craft, making a slow turn over the ruins. It was unlike any aircraft he'd seen before, a pale arrow-shape from this distance, like a splinter of bone. The sun wasn't up over the mountains yet, and the eerie shape moved with a strange grace in the morning shade. A beam of white light suddenly lanced down from its underside, then winked out, and the whistling scream of its engines rose as it accelerated away towards the hazy dotted line of the Skywatchers, marching along the horizon to the south-east. A flash, magnesium-bright, as it passed beyond the shadows, and it was gone, diving into the water neat as a kingfisher.

It had left behind a dark figure huddled on the sand. Ash watched dispassionately as the creature first roused, then gazed about itself in apparent shock. It lurched to its feet and stood swaying for a long moment, then shook its head in a curiously resigned gesture and plodded off up the beach to investigate the bleached ruins of the city.

So her tests, whatever they had been, had failed. Ash sent a couple of Snoops to keep an eye on the creature from a distance, and went back to bed wondering peevishly why he had accepted this trade.

Three days later, it was still a good question, and he was no closer to a satisfactory answer.


	8. Chapter 8

"_All I require from you is to contain him until my return."_

_Contain him._ Ash uttered a ruptured sigh. The creature had been here, what, three days? And already it had crossed the Torrent despite a strong subliminal message not to, got itself close-to-fatally injured wandering about where it had no business being, and then tried to feed on him, whatever the hell _that_ meant, when he rescued it. So, containment; not so much.

Ash rested his elbows on his knees and crushed the heels of his hands into his eyes, yawning. He'd been up close on thirty-six hours, and whatever that enzyme was that the creature had injected into him, the stimulant effects had faded into the sort of hungover stupid-crash that usually followed a three-day festival binge on the kind of moonshine you could use to disinfect surgical instruments. A Fetcher deposited a handful of pills at his elbow, and he sighed and scooped them up obediently, not even bothering to look what they were before tossing them to the back of his mouth and gulping water to wash them down. As he lifted the glass again and drank more deeply, he noticed an odd, sweetish smell and sniffed dubiously at the liquid, wondering if there was a problem with the water supply again, but it smelt and tasted fine and he placed the glass down, puzzled, and sniffed tentatively at his hand.

A faint, sickly scent clung to his skin, and he snuffled the length of his own forearm before a shock of recognition galvanised him: _the Torrent. Shit. How could he have overlooked it?_ He was off the couch and yanking the shirt off over his head as he ran for the shower, yelling for Fetchers, heart pounding in his throat as he twisted the controls and stepped under the jets of water. A stab of nausea doubled him up, and he dropped to his knees, dizzy black dots filling his vision as he dry-heaved. The spasm passed, and he submitted to sitting hunched under the drumming water while Fetchers swarmed over every inch of him, scouring the chemical taint off his skin and fur. At insistent tugging, he turned over and let them continue, although the well-meaning attempt of one particularly conscientious individual to decontaminate the inside of his mouth set him off retching again. _Shock, it's just shock. Oh God, I hope._

The sensation of hundreds of tiny feet tracking through his hair made him want to scratch his scalp bloody, and he gritted his teeth against the urge, forcing his mind away from the physical discomfort. He'd ported into the sea with the tide coming in, only yards away from the Torrent on the other side of that spine of rock, of course the water was contaminated, how could he not have thought of it? _Ash, you idiot_.

Ash brushed away Fetchers who were trying to flush out his eyelids with some stinging stuff, and walked shakily into the outer room to get dried. Blame it on being distracted by the creature he'd rescued, blame it on that damned enzyme screwing with his brain. No way to tell yet how badly he'd been contaminated, or even with what; hell, nobody had ever managed to sort out the crazy mixture of substances that came down from the Glass Tower with the Torrent. It changed all the time. If he was lucky, it'd just be a handful of dodgy alkaloids that would give him the shakes for a day or two, and maybe some low-grade radioactives. As with all things to do with the Torrent of Glass, it was probably best not to think too hard about what would happen if he was unlucky.

Ash sent Fetchers to incinerate the shirt and trousers he'd stripped off, and rummaged through the alcoves to find something warmer, still chilled by the shock. He pulled on soft woollen leggings, and struggled into a loose hooded tunic as he walked to the eyrie. He'd lost the urge to sleep, at least for now. He sent Fetchers to increase the speed of recycling in the Tank water, just in case, but they'd already scrubbed the creature's skin with meticulous thoroughness when they prepped it for surgery. He tried not to think of what the effects might be of the thing having swallowed a bellyful of the stuff.

He extended one claw and trailed the back of it along the smooth rock of the passage wall as he walked, an old habit, and soft light bloomed ahead, died behind, as it always did. He climbed up and stretched out in the deep contours of the chair in its alcove, and pushed his hands into the soft gel of the interface, feeling it snug up warm against his skin, a faint thrill of sensation letting him know it was ready.

First things first; he checked on the vitals readout from the Tank, and frowned at the seemingly contradictory data. The system was trying to make sense of alien life signs using a human matrix, but he didn't have any better way to filter it. Ash puffed out his cheeks, and felt his way through the readings: blood pressure, heart-rate, muscular tension all low, a positive vasodilatory effect, parasympathetic response pretty much as it should be, though the endorphin level was lower than he'd have expected. The creature had come round from the anaesthetic block a couple of hours ago, and its brainwaves had slipped into theta-state with barely a wobble.

He didn't usually monitor the inside of the Tank visually, but before he ported out earlier he'd reconfigured a Snoop, damping all but passive functions, and held it flat against the moisture-beaded surface until its suckers got a grip. Now he called up its live feed on the screen above his head, and spent a few seconds correcting the image to resemble normal lighting conditions.

The creature lay spreadeagled in the waist-deep water, half submerged, arms held out to the sides by cuffs of deceptively slender monofilament, the white hair a halo of pale tendrils fanning out from its head. The tattoos he had noticed in passing when he was supervising the Fetchers earlier now stood out plainly, a stark relief-map of swirling black lines that followed the curve of muscle up from its left forearm over bicep and shoulder and extended down over most of the left side of its body in a series of barbed whiplash recurves, spirals and modified starlike shapes like the one that surrounded its left eye. Below its collarbone, on the left pectoral, an angry-looking slash of proud flesh interrupted the pattern, and Ash recognised it with a queasy tremor as an old scar recently reopened and imperfectly healed: a feeding-mark.

_One who may require your services, depending on the outcome of certain tests._ What the hell had she been doing to him?

Ash shook his head, dismissing the question for now, and zoomed in for a closer look at the dull black carbon fibre construct that immobilised the creature's right leg from hip to ankle; there was no swelling, and almost no discolouration of the pale flesh, which was surprising but which he supposed must be good. It had been a brutal injury, tibia and fibula snapped clean in two, and the femur compromised by an avulsion fracture where the heavy rotator muscle of the thigh had contracted explosively, presumably in the same impact, and torn a chunk of bone away from just above the knee.

The head injury, by contrast, had turned out to be relatively trivial, bleeding freely as head wounds tended to, but no more than a small gash in the scalp and a bad concussion. Potentially much more serious was the crack in the topmost of its protruding spinal processes, which probably happened at the same time as the other injuries. The thing's heavy leather coat with its high collar and spinal padding had saved it from more severe injury, but still... Ash huffed to himself, calculating; if it was the topmost thoracic vertebra or the lowest cervical, what was that ...dexterity in hands and fingers? It had certainly not lacked in manual dexterity or strength when it grabbed him earlier. He wriggled his own spine deeper into the warm embrace of the chair, pushing the memory away, and went back through the vitals again, this time checking for evidence of cervical injury, but its autonomic responses looked fairly normal.

The sudden jump in heart-rate and blood pressure readings made his own heart start pounding again. He switched hastily back to the visual feed and zoomed in on the creature's face, half expecting to find it awake, but the eyes were closed, the lids flickering slightly, and Ash relaxed, feeling foolish: REM sleep. It was just dreaming, that was all, quite normal in the desensitised environment of the Tank. He scanned across the readings again to make sure: raised heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, brain waves lifting well into the alpha range. A not-quite-normal glycine level, and when he checked the feed he could see the ragged rise and fall of its chest as it hyperventilated, small jerky movements of its head creating tiny ripples in the water. Its jaw muscles clenched, teeth gritting together, and he pulled in audio in time to hear it bite off a breathy sound of distress somewhere between a snarl and a moan.

Ash told himself afterwards that it was the logical thing, the only thing, to do. He needed to find out what was wrong with the creature, what had been done to it; he needed to find out more about the woman who had spoken to him – hell, he needed to find out anything he could about these aliens because he had a feeling that what he did not know in this situation could easily kill him.

He withdrew his hands from the interface, and slipped to the sandy floor of the eyrie. He needed to be close to do this, but there was no way he was getting in the Tank with that creature, restraints or no restraints. He drew a shaky breath, and ported before he could change his mind.

The outer surface of the Tank was cool and a little rough under his hands, the floor a complex pattern of interlocking tesserae under his bare feet. There was always a mineral tang to the air down here, and Ash shivered again at the reminder of the Torrent.

Pale, cold light filtered down from the skylight high above, and as Ash settled his back against the side of the Tank and slid down to sit on the tiled floor, he noticed the glow-lights around the walls dimming in response: it must be morning already.

He closed his eyes, schooling his thoughts away from his surroundings, drifting, letting his awareness still, and stop, and wait. Then, as softly as the brush of a butterfly's wing, he reached out.

Ash was aware of his mistake an instant before the creature's mind engulfed his, but it was far too late to withdraw. Faint and far away, he felt his body convulse, but that was nothing compared to the roiling surge of distress and fury pounding at his mind from the creature in the Tank. He cried out in terror, but did not know whether he cried out merely in his thoughts or with his physical voice.

The alien's memory wound itself around him in a choking fog, and clawed hands pulled him down to drown in deep black water.


	9. Chapter 9

_Ash. I am Ash._ Falling, sinking helplessly through waves of imagery and emotion that came and went too quickly to understand, he grappled in panic to fix on identity that dissolved like sea-mist in sunlight before the certainty that surrounded him. _I am Ash... I... am..._ _Wraith. Guide – Navigator – Commander. No. No, ASH, I'm Ash-_

*You should not be here.* The Wraith's mind enfolded him almost absently, intent on something else he could not yet sense. He struggled to free himself, and the creature turned its attention to him with that sudden complete focus that reminded him yet again that this was a predator. The momentary brush of its awareness against his was alien, terrifying, an indelible impression of immense age, and a wiry, supple mind that unrolled his like a map, studied him with a calculating eye, then withdrew. Bitterest irony in the precise touch of its thoughts. *So you're a fixer. Rescue the lost, help the helpless, heal the sick. She abandoned me here... And you wanted to find out what was wrong, what she did to me... You want to know what Wraith are.* A split second of surprise, then grim amusement layered with something between resignation and acceptance. *You've a strong mind, for a human.* He sensed its intent then and flailed, lashing out in desperate self-defence, but it quelled his struggles with ease, folded him within itself with the deft ease of a man pocketing his wallet. *I'll show you.*

A jagged succession of disjointed memories, nested within one another like the restless nightmare images of a fever-dream:

_A dim, warm cave of a room, and beyond a door made of webs a woman, luminous, slender, pale-skinned. A Queen, the image crowded with meaning: Hive-mother, protector, ruler, lover... enemy. _

_Scarlet hair twined in some braided arrangement that was simultaneously severe and sumptuous; pale skin, white and smooth as bone, silver-grey eyes and the barbed black tail of a clan tattoo that licked downwards from the hollow of her throat. Her lips were scarlet too, and curved in a small, cool smile as she allowed his scrutiny._

"_You're a Keeper. Frost." A giddy whirl of confusion and fear and a painful, irrational hope._

"_No." She perceived what was in his mind without effort, and her lip curled. Her mental voice chilled his heart. *Not any more.*_

_He noticed for the first time that she wore the leathers of a ship commander, not the decorative garb of a Queen, and once more she read his thoughts and dismissed them._

_*And yet I **am** a Queen.* She lifted his gaze effortlessly to meet hers, and his breath hissed between his teeth with the strain of pushing her mind away. She permitted it, with a kind of amused tolerance, but an icy thread of fear grew in him at the power he sensed there. He formed the words aloud, with painstaking slowness._

"_Who. Are. You?"_

_Her smile was sharp with irony. "I was indeed Frost, Keeper of the clans for many centuries. Our people slept safe as I stood guard over them." She made a small gesture and the web door retracted, leaving them face to face. She was impossibly slender in the tailored leathers, and the height difference meant that she had to tilt her face up to maintain eye contact. Her pupils dilated, and Guide found he was trembling, adrenalin flooding his limbs. Her grey eyes were deep pools of memory, of sorrow, her throaty voice harsh. "Then the Lanteans came and slew my sister, and the hives woke. And now..." She reached out one finely-armoured claw of her feeding hand to touch his face, and her mind's voice sounded through him like the crash of the sea. *Now I am Sanctuary.* She cupped her palm to touch his cheek. The brush of skin on skin sent him to his knees before her, gasping. His heart was pounding, fear and desire and the terror of her cold strength all crashing together. She saw it. The barbs of her handmouth scraped his jaw, feeding membranes licking greedily at his pulse as she gently passed her open hand across his throat in a gesture part caress, part threat. She leaned close to breathe in the smell of him, peered into his eyes, and her voice was soft again, musing. *But what of you? I don't recognise your clan markings. You were a commander, that much is obvious, but your demeanour says otherwise. And you reek of humans even though any fool can see that you have not fed. Why is that?* She wound long fingers in his hair and twisted his face up to hers, fixing him with her pale eyes, and it was all he could do to keep her out. He screwed his own eyes shut, gritting his teeth with the effort of pushing her mind away._

_*You cannot lie to a Queen.* She had caught the trailing end of a thread in his mind, and he was helpless as she teased at the frayed edge of memory, then abruptly withdrew, bored with her game, and released him. He slumped against the wall of the holding-pen, trembling, unable to hide his relief. Her footsteps were brisk, receding, and her voice very clear and cold in his head. *You would be wise not to try.*_


	10. Chapter 10

_*My clevermen tell me that you refuse to co-operate with their testing.* She tapped clawed fingers on the arms of her throne in a staccato of irritation. *Why?*_

_*Why rename yourself Sanctuary?* The mist that swirled round his feet cooled his hot skin, but nothing could touch the burning in his blood. He dipped his gaze submissively when she frowned, schooling his mind to a mild curiosity, and after a long moment she uttered a sharp sigh._

_*The time of the Keepers was over the second the Lanteans triggered our premature awakening. Some were wearied and stood aside; others of us still stand guard. Some of us see the need to provide an alternative to the old clan loyalties in this time of civil war. Hence Sanctuary. And you have still not answered my question.*_

_His own hunger and irritation betrayed him into impatience. *I am a blade. And-* He bit the thought off, but she saw, and she completed it for him, a tinge of mockery in the sing-song touch of her mind as she tasted his chagrin._

_*You are a blade. And you commanded the greatest alliance of Hives that has ever been, you were there when we drove the cursed Lanteans from this galaxy and forced them to sink their beautiful city beneath the waves. You were Consort, you were Commander, you were Hivemaster, and the trivial requirements of a presumptuous child are beneath you.* _

_She rose from her throne, and the mists writhed in the flick and flare of her long coat as she walked towards him. She had sent the drones away, and they were completely alone. Her scarlet hair was loose about her shoulders, and her coat was open, allowing him to trace the path of the twining black tail of her clan tattoo to where it vanished into the hollow between her breasts. He stood dumbly, unable to move as she halted in front of him. Her nearness, the scent of her that filled his nostrils and sense pits, inflamed and chilled him at the same time. Her wide eyes sought out his gaze, and he was lost in their smoky depths. *So you are a blade, and I am the presumptuous child at play in the ruins of your precious golden age.*_

_*Yes.* No thought of dissembling; he even felt a dizzy twist of relief that she understood the impossibility of the situation._

_*Then strike, if you are truly a blade.* She placed a knife in his off hand, folding his fingers round the grip when he did not move to take it. He began to tremble as she shrugged off her coat and let it fall behind her, lifting her chin proudly. *Do you not wish to be rid of me?*_

_*No. No-* He tried to back away, to drop the knife, but her mind closed around his like a fist. _

_She took another step forward so that the tip of the blade dimpled the soft skin just beneath her breastbone, and whispered out loud, "Make no mistake, **Guide**, your Queen, your precious Snow, is dead and dust these many millennia. I am your Queen now."_

"_Stop." He was trembling so hard he could barely form the word. They were so close that his breath stirred the scarlet hair on her brow. A drop of blood drew a line down her belly from the tip of the knife, and she glanced down at it, and smiled._

_*You see? It would be easy.* She released him from compulsion so abruptly that he swayed, and she steadied him, holding his gaze with those fearless eyes. *I will be your Queen, or I will be dead. You must choose.*_

_*No.*_

_*Yes. Kneel before your Queen!*_

_He was panting like a man in a fever. "No. No. Never."_

_*Then strike me down.*_

_Between clenched teeth. *"I. Will. Not."*_

"_Strike!"_

_*No-*_

"_**Strike!**"_

_He was beyond words, teeth bared in a savage snarl as he drove the blade home. She fell at his feet in a spreading pool of blood, and he sank to his knees, the knife dropping from his fingers, reaching out for her._

The scarlet hair, fine and soft, so like hers...

_*Guide.*_

_He lifted his head vaguely, still stunned by the violence of the moment, and between one blink of the eye and the next, everything slipped in a sickening lurch of perception._

_He was still in the holding-pen, the bloody corpse was gone, and there were drones all around him. The only thing that had not changed was that he was still on his knees. Realisation turned his guts to ice. _So simple, a child could have seen through it.

_Her boot heels clicked as she walked round from behind him. Her hair was still tightly laced in that complicated braid, and her coat buttoned to the neck. *A child could have seen through it, yes... but you did not. I find that most intriguing.*_

_Shame burned hotter even than the hunger in his bones. He hunched his shoulders and kept his face averted so that she would not see the tears that forced their way from beneath his closed eyelids. _Oh, my Queen...

_*Out.* The drones filed obediently from the cell, and after a pause, she followed them. He heard the rustle as the web door expanded to fill the opening. This time, she did not speak as she walked away._

T_wo drones had brought him the short distance from the holding-pen. Now they held him by the arms, their attention on the cleverman waiting beside the feeding cells._

_*Queen Sanctuary has ordered that you feed.* The scientist glanced at Guide, mind veiled but exuding a mixture of curiosity and distaste as he tapped something into the data pad he carried._

_*Why?* His bald question surprised the cleverman._

_*Our data indicates that catabolysis has set in. That is, due to lack of nourishment, your body has begun to break down its own muscular and organic tissue-*_

_*I know what catabolysis is.* Guide straightened momentarily, distracted by his irritation at the youngster's condescension. *I meant, why does Sanctuary care what happens to me?*_

_*Our Queen does not like to be thwarted.* The cleverman met his gaze for the first time with sharp, intelligent eyes. *You offend her, blade. She doesn't want you to become too weak to tell her what she wants to know.* He nodded towards the nearest cell, where a young man hung in the restraint webs, watching them with dull eyes. *Take that one.*_

_The drones dragged him across so that he was face to face with the man. When they dropped his arms, he was so weak he all but fell, and had to steady himself against the webs. The man whimpered in terror, dark eyes showing white all round the iris, and Guide dragged the sweet fear-scent into his lungs in an ecstatic gasp. His need was so acute he did not even wait to cut through the man's shirt but fumbled his shaking hand flat, flexing his fingers to set his claws, snarling as his handmouth sliced through fabric and flesh together and he began to drink, clinging to the webs oblivious to all but the soothing flood of the life-force washing through him. His own cries mingled with those of the human, and he was not aware of anything until the cleverman's voice spoke, right behind him._

_*That's enough.*_

_The drones wrenched his handmouth away from the man's flesh too quickly, and he tasted his own blood in the torn feeding membranes. The cleverman watched him dispassionately as he cradled the injured hand. Guide snarled at him reflexively._

_*Why did you stop me?*_

_*Queen's orders.* The scientist tapped at his data pad again. *You're permitted only enough to keep you alive. Nothing more.*_


	11. Chapter 11

Ash drifted blearily back. _Sanctuary_. He shivered at the memory of her wide grey eyes and the knowing touch of her mind, cold as frost, burning like embers. _Queen Sanctuary._

*You wanted to know what Wraith are.* Guide's mental tone was almost apologetic.

Unbidden, the image rose up of the dark-eyed man trapped in the webs of the feeding cell, the tendons in his neck standing out as he shrieked and his body twisted, shrivelled. Ash thrust the image at the Wraith in a hot blaze of anger. *That was feeding? _That_ was what you wanted to do to me?*

*Wraith must feed, or die.* Absent again, a tinge of irritation in the tone. Ash swallowed his own feelings with an effort, tasting again the muddle of sensation and emotion in Guide's memory _– starvation, like a long-banked fire, that had consumed him from the inside until every breath, every movement, was agony; the prey's fear-scent filling him with the dizzy promise of relief. The hot burrowing stab of the handmouth as it pierced through cloth and flesh, claws pulling it deep to deliver the quickening, and the blessed backwash of energy as he began to drink, cool fingers licking up his arm, steadying his faltering heart._

_Then the life-force was wrenched away by hard hands, his claws ripped from his prey's flesh before he was ready, and he was stranded in a fog of desperate physical need, terror bitter as ashes in his mouth: she knew. Somewhere in that nightmare swirl of illusion, Sanctuary had slipped past his carefully-woven walls and discovered his darkest secret. She had found Acastus Kolya, and she knew what he had done._

*Kolya?*

Ash was sharply aware of Guide's revulsion, hate that stank like burning flesh, tasted of his own blood, but the Wraith could not block him out: _a bear of a man, tall for a human, black-haired, the skin of his face pockmarked from some old illness and fiercely furrowed round a fleshy nose that had been broken too many times. A mobile, mocking mouth. But it was the eyes that captured your attention: sharp, black, with a fan of fine creases at the outer corners that you could mistake for laughter-lines until you met their empty gaze._

_*Enough!* _Rage. Rage, and shame that seared like acid. The alien took him and slammed him back into his own body so hard it was some minutes before Ash could do more than lie shuddering on the tiled floor of the Tank chamber, gasping for breath and wondering idiotically why, if he was so very relieved to be out of the thing's clutches, he felt such a surge of pity for it.

"_Do you know why you are here, Wraith?"_

_The words floated to his ears from a tremendous distance, barely audible over the laboured, limping cadences of his own blood. He was sitting in a chair, held upright by straps that cramped his lungs and dug in cruelly under armpits and ribs. They had taken his coat, and he was cold. No clear memory of how he got here, only a vague recollection of the clink of metal buckles as his captors yanked the straps tight. The voice spoke again, more sharply this time._

"_Get it some water."_

_Water... water extinguishes fire... for a delirious moment, he rolled the thought in his mind like a pebble under his tongue. Water to quench the cramping burn in his muscles, water rushing in to flash into steam under the coiled heat at his core, fill up the arid spaces of his lungs, soothe his burning throat..._

_Footsteps approaching, and a hollow clank of metal._

_The icy water hit him full in the face and snapped his head back like a blow; he choked for air, heart hammering, abruptly aware that his hands and feet too were held fast, strapped to the heavy frame of the chair._

_Light stabbed at him, too much light after so many days of lying in the dark on the foetid straw. He veiled his eyes, the nictitating membrane sliding across his vision like mist, and stared, shivering, at the uniformed human sitting across the wooden desk a few feet in front of him._

_A big man, not some fussy bureaucrat, his uniform jacket unbuttoned and his cap tossed aside on the desk. This man was not as calm as his outward demeanour suggested, but he was not afraid, not like the other humans that surrounded them. Guide felt the prickle of excitement that ran through him as he closed the file he had been affecting to read and placed it neatly to one side, then propped his chin on his hands, studying his prisoner carefully before meeting his gaze for the first time. Black eyes in a scarred slab of a face, their expression deceptively mild. His voice was deep, and not especially loud._

"_I am Commander Acastus Kolya. I'll ask again: do you know why you are here?"_

_Guide bared his teeth and snarled. The man ignored the display of aggression and flipped open the file again, riffling papers._

"_My men inform me that you were captured when your Dart crashed and you were cut off from the Ring. That seems... uncharacteristically careless." When Guide kept silent, the man Kolya scraped his chair back and strolled round the desk, the black eyes narrowed, the tone light, musing. "I'm curious... Many times I've seen Wraith kill themselves rather than fall into enemy hands alive. Explosives, poison, even a knife across their own throat. Messy, but effective. A matter of honour, perhaps. Do you creatures understand honour?"_

_Guide shifted his gaze deliberately to stare past the man, and permitted his upper lip to curl slightly. Kolya paused in his seemingly casual pacing, directly in front of the chair._

"_Imagine my surprise, then, when my men tell me they've recovered a downed Wraith Dart, and have the pilot locked up, alive and unharmed!" In his peripheral vision, Guide saw Kolya smile slightly. He lowered his voice conspiratorially, the wicked tingle of anticipation in his mind clearer than ever. "Your Hive must know where you are. But in, what, four months, nobody has come looking for you." He leaned forward suddenly, big hands gripping Guide's forearms painfully where they were bound to the arms of the chair, and stared directly into Guide's eyes. "Now why do you suppose that is?"_

_Guide hissed and snapped his teeth, straining against the leather straps, infuriated by the man's presumption. Kolya held his gaze a second longer, then chuckled and walked away._

"_They will come." As always, the sound of his voice sent a collective shiver through the room. Kolya stopped and turned his head slightly. Guide straightened as best he could in the restraints, and lifted his chin proudly despite the water that still dripped from his beard. "They will come, and you will be Culled."_

"_No! They have abandoned you here!" Kolya rounded on him, two swift strides bringing him back to his place in front of the chair. He stared into Guide's face for a long moment. "Tell, me, Wraith... are you hungry?"_

_Guide stared back, a growl rumbling in his throat, unable to quell the trembling that spread from his feeding hand. _

_Kolya's eyes were black pits. "We Genii have a saying. 'A hungry man is not a free man.'" Acastus Kolya smiled gently, mockingly. "I understand hunger is extremely painful to your kind."_


	12. Chapter 12

Ash opened his eyes, and swore softly. It was a favourite expression of his, a satisfyingly lyrical run of sounds he'd learned from a Charreki trader last fall when the woman's shallow-keeled coaster had run aground during a storm and stranded her with him in the Caves for nearly three weeks. That wasn't all she'd taught him, and he twitched again at the memory, thoroughly distracted now, and sighed in exasperation, uncoiling from his meditative pose to stretch the kinks out of his spine.

He'd ported straight up to the eyrie when he came round from the shock of mindsharing, spent a few dazed minutes checking and re-checking the Tank stats, then got a Fetcher to mix him a strong sleeping-draught and dozed off right there in the chair. He'd woken almost a full day later in his bed, rested but restless. No dreams, or none that he could recall, which had been the point of the knock-out draught after those nightmare-ridden hours tangled in the Wraith's mind. Coming up here to the sea-caves to clear his head had seemed like a good idea a few hours ago, but the presence of the creature in the Tank pulled at his equilibrium like a lode-stone.

Ash yawned delicately, then less so, wondering how he could possibly still be tired. Mindsharing was a strain sometimes, sure, especially without the help of the Mirror, but that was usually because he was trying to share with some dead-brain. The Wraith, on the other hand... Ash shivered involuntarily, spoiling the tail-end of his stretch. A race of telepaths, and not just some vestigial ability but the full whack if he was any judge. Its sheer strength was frightening. Its mind had not been completely alien, not after that first stultifying touch, but it had called him 'strong - for a human' with unconscious superiority, then subdued him without breaking a sweat. And this, he reminded himself bitterly, was a damaged Wraith, one whose mental state was 'questionable', who was dangerous because he was not _whole_, whatever the hell that meant.

Ash was beginning to be able to guess at some of what it might mean. Unfortunately, if he allowed himself to consider such a thing, then certain other things followed in logical conclusion.

He ported back to the eyrie without getting up, and settled into the comforting embrace of the chair, sliding into the interface like a fish into water: Sanctuary had left an advance payment, two plastic cases, deposited by the alien craft at the same time as his unwelcome visitor, containing valuable mineral salts that even he had difficulty getting hold of. He groaned out loud as the data came back: the cases were empty.

Ash withdrew from the interface, fuming, and slapped his open hand on the edge of the console hard enough to sting. "Stupid. _Stupid, _Ash!" What had he been thinking? He knew how trade worked, knew better than _this_–

Well. However it happened, however she'd worked the trick, it just confirmed his fears: Sanctuary wasn't coming back. For whatever reason – weakness, injury, a questionable mental state, whatever – she had abandoned the one she had sent to him. Ash suspected gloomily that the only person to whom this would appear as news was himself.


	13. Chapter 13

It was becoming more difficult to distinguish between waking and sleeping, but Guide was fairly certain that he was awake when he noticed the change, and smiled.

The cleverman – fixer or healer or whatever he called himself, it amounted to the same thing – the one who identified himself as _Ash_... Guide normally ignored the irritatingly arbitrary sound-labels the humans put on themselves as not only meaningless but needless: Wraith, who spoke mind to mind, had no need of such artificial devices, even when dealing with non-telepathic races. One's identity simply _was_, there was no mistaking one for another. But the human cleverman's mental touch was by turns cool and warm, feather-light, the shape of his thoughts seeming firm until one attempted to touch them, when they crumbled to nothing but left a soft, clinging residue that was most troublesome to expunge. Yes, Guide grumbled to himself: _Ash_ fitted the human's essence perfectly.

Since he had expelled the human from his mind with such force, Guide had idly tracked his now-familiar presence, sometimes fainter, sometimes stronger as he moved around the cave complex. There had been a long period when he could barely sense Ash at all, the human's mental activity unnaturally damped, and Guide guessed that he had taken some sort of sleep-inducing drug; the resulting sense of isolation had reminded him too sharply of his time in Kolya's prison, and he did not seem to have the strength to fight off the memories that pressed in to plague him.

Forcing himself to keep track of Ash helped keep his mind clear, up to a point. The cleverman was not often close enough for the Wraith to sense his mood, but at this moment, his rage and dismay were like a silent shout of outrage. Guide opened his eyes in the dark, his interest sharpening, and found the human's mind an undisciplined torrent of barely coherent emotions, the strongest of which held a bitter taste he recognised all too well. Guide smiled grimly, and his voice woke hissing echoes in the confined space. "And thus are we both betrayed." 

* * *

><p>"<em>And thus are we both betrayed."<em> Ash tapped a claw on the interface pad to freeze the video feed, and gazed speculatively at the image on the screen. The Wraith appeared to be staring directly at the camera, though that had to be an illusion – the medical datastream confirmed that its sight had not returned following the head injury – and the tips of its sharp teeth were visible in what he realised was a smile. He checked the time-stamp on the feed: two hours ago, give or take, right after he discovered Sanctuary's duplicity. He had been pacing around the eyrie, up and down the corridors, unable to settle, his head in a whirl of rage and self-recrimination.

Struck by a sudden sinking feeling, Ash ran the video back ten seconds, and let it run again, zooming in on the face. He wondered if it was simply imagination that made it appear more gaunt than before, the curve of closed lids in deep eye-sockets and the hollows of its cheeks pared to the bone so that the alien lying so still in the shallow pool resembled something carved in stone. The eyes opened suddenly, flickering a little from side to side, then the bony face twisted in that faint, ironic smile. The reaction was unmistakable.

Ash froze the feed with a trembling hand before he could hear the whispered words again. It had heard him... no, _overheard_ his thoughts, his feelings, two storeys down through solid rock and locked in a soundproofed box. The realisation froze Ash where he lay in the chair, his heart hammering in his own ears, mouth gone dry with terror.

If the Wraith could hear his thoughts from this distance, what else could it do? When he had slipped into its mind yesterday, supremely confident in his own all but undetectable touch, it had sensed him instantly, rifled through his thoughts without a by-your-leave, forced him to witness its nightmarish memories then thrown him out of its mind like a bouncer kicking a drunk downstairs.

Remembering the offhand power of the Wraith's mental touch, Ash was gripped by a sudden, sickening certainty that it would be able to extend its compulsion beyond the Tank room. The instinct to put distance between them was instant and irresistible. He ported another floor up, landing on his backside in the sandy corridor, scrambled to his feet and ported again, this time to the topmost store-caves, and stood in the cool, damp-smelling dark for a long moment, fists clenched at his sides, all his senses bristling.

Nothing, only the sound of his own shaky breathing. After a minute, Ash drew a deeper breath, and let it go more slowly. His eyes had adjusted to the dark enough to show him a scatter of boxes, and he sat down rather sharply on the nearest as his knees gave way, and cradled his head in his hands, forcing down the panic by an act of will.

"Calm down, Ash." He had spoken out loud for the comfort of hearing a human voice, but the quavering whisper was hardly reassuring. He cleared his throat and tried again. "It can't find you up here, you're safe..." He trailed off. Who was he kidding? Sanctuary had left him with an impossible choice. Knowing what he now did about how it fed, he could not safely release the Wraith... but how could he keep it prisoner? Even if it was not able to invade his mind and compel him to release it, how could he, Ash, the fixer, the healer, knowingly condemn it to the agonies of solitary confinement and a slow death by starvation?


	14. Chapter 14

The sudden jolt of terror went through Guide like an electric shock. He had been drifting again, the words of a famous death-verse straggling through his head. He had been subtly aware that the lines were out of their proper order, and was irritated by it at the same time as knowing he had no power to change this.

_When I had no supper my eyes dined._

_When I had no lover, I courted my sleep._

Except that I cannot see, thought Guide, and sleep has become a wasteland filled with monsters.

_When I had no eyes, I listened._

_When I had no ears, I thought._

_When I had no thought I waited._

Listened, standing in the noisome straw of the outbuilding. Thought of the past in the musty underground cell, thought and remembered and waited till it sent him mad. Waited in the glare and grit of the deserted city on the sand. Waited and waited, without thought, without hope, and knew himself lost, utterly changed, broken in ways that he could not even begin to name.

_When I have no means, fortune is my means._

Luck, Guide mused: luck, the last counsel of the desperate. But the satire felt hollow; his luck had run out long ago.

_When I had no roof, I made audacity my roof._

_When I had no enemy, I opposed my body._

He had tried - tried so hard – mind and body hardened by millennia of enduring pain in battle – but this battle he had lost. More, he had lost himself, lost everything that made him who he was. Consort to a dead Queen, a Commander with no men to command, a Hivemaster with no Hive to nurture, a Guide, a navigator buried in the suffocating dark underground for so long, he had forgotten the simplest things. A human's thin voice chimed in to corroborate his own bitter memory, the man's mental touch acid-sharp with realisation: "You have no idea where the Stargate is, do you?"

He had been in agony from unhealed bullet wounds in his side, bleeding internally, one lung partially collapsed. He had struggled this far fuelled by the crazy hope that this strange human had inspired, but now shame drained away the last of his energy, and he sank to the ground, panting, unable to meet the man's gaze. Unable, even now, to admit his fault to an inferior in so many words. "It was many years ago."

"Way to go, John! Listening to a _Wraith!" _The vehement sarcasm of the human's self-abnegation surprised a hiss of laughter from Guide. He swallowed the sound, struggling for breath.

"It was not my intention to deceive you, Sheppard." Such a strange feeling, as if it truly mattered that this prey believed him.

_Need is my tactic, detachment is my strategy._

Need. He had used it before - used hunger, pain - to give himself a necessary edge, the reckless desperation in battle or personal combat that marked the quick from the dead. He had courted it secure in the knowledge that afterwards, he could feed, heal, quench the burning in his blood.

Not this time. Need, hunger, pain... these were the tools that Kolya had used to unmake him.

_When I have nothing, death will be my fortune._

Guide had not been that fortunate. He had come close... so close to death, more times than he could count, longing for its release, only to be dragged back over the threshold of existence because his master still had a use for him.

Ash's terror set his heart hammering. The suddenness of it after hours of absence startled Guide into trying to sit up in the shallow pool; the thin cords that secured his arms and legs brought him up short and he flopped back with a cry that turned into a gurgle as warm, salty water slopped into his mouth. He struggled and choked, gasping for air, his own fear amplified by the human's panic.

Just as suddenly, it was gone. Guide coughed the last of the water out of his burning throat and steadied his breathing with an effort. He quested out after the faint traces of the cleverman's presence, and located him finally in a dark, damp-smelling cave close to the surface. The human's thoughts were hazy at this distance, but his fear – and its source – were clear.

Guide withdrew with some care. He could not afford to alienate the human further, especially after his clumsy attempt to feed on it had failed. If teleportation was common on this world, it was clear why Wraith had never Culled here; as a protective adaptation, it was difficult to fault. The sensation in his feeding hand as the human dematerialised had been most unpleasant.

Guide forced himself to relax, limb by limb, and allow the warm liquid to support his weight again. Bringing logical thought into focus was a struggle. He was in a flotation tank. His right leg felt strange and did not respond when he tried to move it, so perhaps he had been injured. He could not have fed, or the leg would have healed, but the familiar burn of hunger was noticeably fainter.

There was a cannula in the back of his off hand; if he moved his wrist inside its encircling restraint, he could feel the stiff shape of the needle under the skin and wondered, belatedly, what drugs had been used on him. His head and neck ached with a dull persistence that eroded concentration. To drift was so much easier.

He remembered the ruined city, empty as a bleached skeleton at the edge of the sea, white stones half buried in white sand, great colonnades of crumbling pillars in the cliffs. He remembered lying on his belly on warm rock with the sun hot on his back, remembered a rock-pool, and the sting of salt water in his handmouth.

The hermit crab. Guide shuddered at the memory of its spiderlike limbs squirming in his palm as he tried to feed on it. There had been other things since that he had assumed were simply part of his nightmares – tiny, many-limbed, swarming over him. He groped through the scraps of memory and knowledge he had gleaned from his contact with Ash. Not nightmares: sentient tools, organic, nearly indestructible. Servants. _Fetchers_. As if in response to the thought, he felt a twitch of the cord securing his left arm, and one of the things stepped on to the back of his off hand. He jerked at the cord with an exclamation of disgust, trying to flip it off, but it ignored his movements and pattered imperturbably to the cannula. A tingling cold sensation spread from the spot.

The Fetcher had injected a drug into his bloodstream. _So death will be my fortune after all. _Guide barely had time to formulate the thought before blankness overtook him.

* * *

><p><strong>Author's note: the Wraith death-verse is extracted from the poem 'Samurai Song' by Rob Pinsky; I've always felt that Samurai and Wraith would have an instinctive understanding of one another.<strong>


End file.
